


Fic Snippets

by rosestone



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 17:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13956351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosestone/pseuds/rosestone
Summary: Bits and pieces I've been working on that haven't come to anything quite yet.  May be expanded later; may not.  Fic adoption is welcome, just please let me know so I can enjoy someone else's take on the story.





	1. Index

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I've posted anything, and I'd really like to change that. Hopefully I'll be updating some of my WIPs soonish - I'm horrendously stuck, but I'm hoping the Han Solo movie will unstick the Soloverse (either because I like it and want to use its canon to inform the next few fics, or because spite). In the meantime, my brain keeps throwing ideas at me that don't go anywhere much, so I thought I'd throw some of them at AO3 instead. This chapter is going to serve as an index/blurb-collector, which will hopefully soon have more than a few entries on it.

Chapter 1: [Sailing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13956351/chapters/32127630) \- When Obi-Wan Kenobi brings Luke to Tatooine, Beru knows there's more to the story than he's telling them.

Chapter 2: [Ambition and Cunning](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13956351/chapters/32127996) \- Hermione Granger gets a chance to do her first year at Hogwarts over. The decisions she makes are... significantly different to the first time around.


	2. Sailing (Star Wars, prequel era)

Beru Whitesun had seen men on the verge of breaking before.  Tatooine was a harsh place to live, and not everybody was built for it.

She’d excused the raw exhaustion in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice when he’d commed them – their unit was cheap and constantly on the verge of breaking; nobody sounded good on it.  There was no way to do the same when he sat in front of them.  There was nothing outwardly wrong – his clothes were as clean as could have been expected after a trip across Tatooine, his hair neatly clipped, no visible wounds – but he looked like somebody had gutted him.  Taken a knife to his soft insides, slapped some bacta on the damage, and left him to stumble drunkenly onwards.  His hands twitched where they rested on the table, as if he expected there still to be a weight in them; she suspected he hadn’t set Luke down the entire journey, a welcome distraction from whatever horrors he’d left behind.

“Master Kenobi,” Owen said, folding his hands before him, “we thank you for bringing Luke to us.  But if you don’t mind my asking…  What happened?”

Kenobi blinked at them.  “That… is a very long story.”

“To my step-brother,” Owen clarified.  “And his – wife, I assume?  The child’s mother.”

For a flicker of a moment, agonised grief overtook Kenobi’s calm expression.  “They’re both dead.  I – I understand, if you want to hear what happened –”

“You should rest,” Owen said, standing.  “There’s a guest room down the hall.”

“I’ll sort something out for Luke,” Beru said.  They didn’t have a crib, so the heavily-padded box he was sleeping in would have to do for now.  She supposed he’d have to stay in with them, in case he woke in the night.

“I don’t mean to impose,” Kenobi said, swaying on the spot as he rose from his seat.

Owen snorted.  “Don’t be ridiculous.  You’ve brought my nephew home – doubtless saved him from a terrible fate – and you’re clearly exhausted.  It’s the least we can do.”

Beru scooped Luke’s makeshift bed up from the table as Owen led Kenobi off to the bedroom, interrupting his attempts to refuse their hospitality.  She paused, staring down at Luke, and wondered.

She’d known men who’d broken from sheer unending grief.  Some from the loss of lovers or children or siblings; some for other reasons.  Tatooine was a harsh planet.  Most people didn’t die peacefully in their beds.

His heartache could be excused away as the loss of a dear friend, or a brother, or perhaps a lover.  But it didn’t sit right.  Maybe Jedi grieved differently – but that didn’t seem right either.  He was still human, after all, and that vaunted Jedi calm was clearly nothing more than a façade right now.

Whatever had happened to Anakin Skywalker and his wife, Beru was certain that it was more complicated and unpleasant than _they both died_.

She wouldn’t like hearing it, of that she was certain.  But if she and Owen were going to care for this child, they had to know no nasty secrets were going to take them by surprise, and if that meant prying out the truth behind Obi-Wan Kenobi’s grief?

Well.  Sometimes you had to be cruel to be safe.  That was another truth she’d learned on Tatooine.

 

 

Beru glanced up from the vaporator as Owen came to a halt beside her, a pail swinging from his hand.

“I brought you out some lunch,” he said.  “Something’s wrong?”

“Nothing I can’t fix,” she said, shrugging.  “Not a problem yet, but it will be, and you know I think better with a repair job in front of me.”

“Mmm.”  He knelt down, handing her a sandwich.  “Kenobi’s looking after Luke.  Needs something to think about that isn’t people dying.”

“So, what did he say about Anakin?”  Beru squinted at the vaporator’s insides.

Owen blew out a breath.  “This new Emperor we’ve heard about on the Holonet had some kind of hold over the clone army.  Got them to kill off the Jedi.  The Emperor went after Anakin’s wife Padmé, Anakin went after him, and they both ended up dead.”

“Hmm.”

“You don’t believe him,” Owen said.

“It’s very… dramatic-sounding,” Beru said, putting her sandwich down so she could start refitting the vaporator’s insides.  “But… I don’t know how to put it.  My instincts are saying it’s worse.”

“Worse than that?”  Owen sounded sceptical, but he’d listened to Beru’s instincts before.  “You’re not planning on trying to pry it out of him, are you?”

“Someone has to,” she said, shrugging.  “You’re too kind-hearted to cause him more pain.”

“You really think now is the time?  Man’s walking dead.”

“Better to do it before whatever he’s hiding starts causing trouble.”

He sighed.  “At least give him a little time to recover.”

“I’ve got a few more vaporators to look over,” Beru said.  “That’s time.”

Owen snorted.  “Sure it is.”  He stood, dusting sand off his knees, and lifted the pail.  “I’d better make sure he’s keeping out of trouble.  Comm me if you see anything moving out there.”

“I won’t forget just because we’ve had a surprise visitor,” Beru said, smiling.

“Might be something worse out there than Sand People right now,” Owen said, squinting towards the horizon.  “Might be our guest’s being hunted.  So keep your eyes open.”

“I’ll see you later,” Beru said, and bent back to her task as he set off to the house.

 

 

When Beru came in from the farm, dusty and tired from a long day of repairs, she found Kenobi seated at the kitchen table again, eyes fixed on Luke, who was gumming at a fist.

“You know you can’t watch him like this for the rest of his childhood,” Beru said, putting her hands under the sonic.  “I think he’d find it rather unsettling, once he was old enough to understand.”

He glanced up at her.  Kenobi looked a great deal less exhausted than he had when he’d arrived, the dark hollows beneath his eyes faded away with rest and the hunch in his back straightened; but she could still see the raw horror and anguish in his eyes.  Perhaps she always would.

“It wouldn’t be safe, in any case,” he said.  “Better to make a clean break.”

“Of course.”  Beru slid into the seat opposite him, hands folded in front of her.  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.”

“Oh?”

“I want to know,” Beru said, fixing her eyes on his, “who’s after Luke.”

“I’m sorry?”  Maybe on a normal day he could have passed it off as confusion, but Beru could see the panic on his face.  She hardened her heart, reminding herself that a child’s life lay in the balance here, and sat up straighter.

“You came in secret, using back ways.  Slowly, too – if you’d come straight to Tatooine after Anakin’s death you’d have been here sooner.  So you were hiding.  Who were you hiding from?”

He relaxed ever so slightly.  “The Emperor killed all the Jedi.  I had to hide for my own protection.”

“Then why bring Luke yourself, if it’s so dangerous for him to be around you?  Why not ask one of Anakin’s wife’s friends to bring him, or send him in a shuttle with a medical droid to watch over him?”

He froze, eyes wide with grief and – shame?  “I –”  He opened and closed his mouth, staring at her, and dropped his head into his hands.

Beru waited.

“Anakin…”  His voice was muffled, faltering.  “Anakin – he isn’t dead.”

Her gut lurched.  More complicated and unpleasant than death.  Right.

“He fell,” Kenobi said.

“What does that mean?”

“Right.  You wouldn’t – Anakin fell to the Dark Side.  Forsake his vows, forsake the Code, the _Jedi_ –”  His voice broke.  “He killed her.  Padmé.  Palpatine managed to convince him to join the Sith, but I couldn’t find him, so I sent her after him – knew she’d be able to find him – and he – if I hadn’t been there, maybe he wouldn’t have been so angry, maybe she could have brought him back…”  He paused, breath hitching.  “I thought – I thought I’d killed him.  Left him for dead.  But I can – I trained him.  I can feel him in the Force.  He’s so – so angry.  In pain.”

“You think he’ll come after Luke,” Beru said.  She had to be practical.  She didn’t know how to address – _this._

Kenobi raised his head to meet her eyes.  “He was obsessed enough with saving Padmé’s life that he became what she hated.  I don’t know if he’d care about Luke for his own sake – I don’t know if he _can_ – but as the last living remnant of Padmé?  Yes.  He’d come for that.  And Palpatine would encourage him – Luke would be useful leverage against Anakin in case he ever got any ideas, and I think he’d like to have a powerful child raised from birth to follow the Dark Side.”

“I see.”  Beru stood slowly.  All the aches from her day of work seemed to have caught up with her at once.  “I’m sorry to have pried into something you clearly didn’t want to talk about.  Thank you for telling me.”

He frowned at her.

 

 

Beru stared down at Luke, chubby fingers wrapped around his blanket and face relaxed by sleep.  She didn’t love him.  He was just a baby, a baby given to her by a stranger.  A step-nephew born to two people she’d never met and now never would.

Still, she felt vaguely protective – the way most people would when handed an infant, she supposed – and it put things into perspective.  He’d be safer if they gave him away.  Luke Skywalker of Tatooine was a target.  Some anonymous human child on a world far from here?  Not so much.

She glanced up as Owen entered.  He stooped over the crib, running a calloused finger over Luke’s cheek.

He’d taken their inability to conceive a child over the last few years harder than she had, Beru remembered.

Well.  Maybe being Luke Skywalker of Tatooine wasn’t safe, and maybe it’d be too hard for them to become someone other than the Lars family on a planet where information was coin and the Hutts kept meticulous records of landowners – but that didn’t mean they didn’t have other options.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My vague idea for this fic was that, having found out the truth, Beru and Owen (and a very confused Obi-Wan) would acquire a ship and travel the galaxy, since keeping Luke on his father's planet, with his father's only remaining relatives, struck them as a terrible idea. I don't really know what was going to happen, though. I did briefly play with the idea that Padmé had survived and was a prisoner of the Empire, and that at some point she'd escape and Shenanigans would occur, but again: I didn't know where it was going. I like this bit, though.


	3. Ambition and Cunning (Harry Potter)

Hermione remained stubbornly closed-lipped until they reached the clock tower.  She flicked her wand at the staircase behind them with a murmured incantation, leaving an orangey haze in the air twenty feet down – something to warn them if somebody else came up the stairs, Pansy presumed, though honestly with Granger who even knew? – and only then did the tension seep out of her shoulders.  She settled against the wall with a sigh, rubbing at one temple.

“So?”  Pansy had absolutely no intention of letting her off the hook, no matter how tired she tried to look.  “Your parents are _Muggles?_ ”

“That isn’t the question you want to ask,” Hermione said, not looking up.

Pansy folded her arms, leaning forward, because of _course_ she always had to be right, didn’t she?  Didn’t know another way to be.  “You didn’t tell me.  You didn’t tell _any_ of us.”

There was irritation in Hermione’s eyes when she raised them.  “That defeats the purpose of pretending to be a Pureblood.”

“Why _bother?_   You’ve seen the way everyone’s been acting.  If you’d stayed a Muggleborn they would’ve loved you.  You would’ve been a perfect example that blood isn’t everything, and instead they hate you because the blood purists have been using you as an example of good breeding and you clearly never intended to correct them.”

Her lips twisted.  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, frankly.  But… I do owe you an explanation, you’re right.”  She shifted against the wall.  “I suppose it all starts with a particularly strange example of accidental magic, the Halloween before I started at Hogwarts.”

“Accidental magic?  Seriously?”

“Do you want to hear the explanation,” Hermione said, frowning, “or not?”

Pansy huffed, but leaned back against the opposite wall.  “Go on, then.”

“I had a dream – well, more of a nightmare.  I dreamed that, the next summer, Professor McGonagall came to me and told me that all the strange things that had been happening around me my entire life was magic.  I was a witch, and I was going to go to Hogwarts.  I was… so excited.  When I got there, I was sorted into Gryffindor; the Hat saw all those things you’re always scolding me about, my inclination to jump in head-first and my determination to make things better without always thinking them through, and decided that if it put me in Ravenclaw I’d probably just end up burying myself in books for the rest of my life.  But I was miserable there.  I didn’t get on with the girls in my dorm, and most of my year thought I was an annoying know-it-all.  On Halloween, I heard a few of them saying nasty things about me and ended up so miserable I ended up spending the feast hidden in the girls’ bathroom near the back stairs.”

She paused, eyes flicking up at Pansy, and Pansy blinked rapidly.  Merlin-damned Granger always expected her to think at the same bloody speed as she did, as if everyone had a near-perfect memory, and there had to be _something_ significant about that –

“Do you remember the troll,” Hermione said, and Pansy blanched.  The troll that had somehow made its way from the dungeons to the rest of the school, that had ended up trapped in a bathroom and tore it to shreds in fury, that had seemed so terrifyingly large when they carted it out of the school under a strong sleeping spell…

“It was between me and the door,” Hermione continued, voice soft.  “I screamed, but nobody was near enough to hear me – I suppose the portraits would have spread the word eventually, but not soon enough.  I didn’t know any useful spells.  _Lumos_ just made it angrier.  It hit me into the corner.”  She swallowed.  “It raised its club above me, and all I could do was look up at it and know I was about to die.”

“And then?”

“And then,” she said, meeting Pansy’s eyes, “I woke up in my own bed, precisely one year earlier, and knew _everything_ that was going to happen.”

Pansy rubbed her face.  “Accidental magic.”

“Precisely.”

“Really stupid accidental magic.  I mean, why not just… blast it?  Or accidental Apparition?  Why… this?”

Hermione shrugged.  “I’m not inclined to complain; I quite like the way matters have turned out this time around.  Well… maybe not entirely, having the entire school dislike me is going to be a problem, but _overall_ it’s an improvement.”

“So,” Pansy said, pushing off the wall, “I suppose you would’ve gone to Diagon Alley first, to prove it was real, since they wouldn’t have told you anything yet and I can’t imagine you making important life decisions without evidence one way or the other.  You decided to ask the Hat not to put you in Gryffindor – though why Slytherin?  That’s… not a sensible decision.”

Hermione’s cheeks darkened.  “It wasn’t deliberate.  I was going to ask for Ravenclaw, but the research I did before McGonagall turned up suggested that there was bigotry in all the Houses, not just Slytherin.  The Slytherins were loudest about it because, in the aftermath of the war, a lot of blood purists told their children to ask for Slytherin, and as a result there was a stronger anti-purism bias in the other houses, so being openly biased as a non-Slytherin was likely to lead to social isolation.  But historically speaking, there were people on both sides of the debate in all four Houses – in fact, there are quite a few famous Muggleborn Slytherins.  I didn’t want to spend the next seven years being looked down on because of my birth, and I couldn’t find any evidence to suggest I might be descended from a Squib.”

“And then you found a reclusive Pureblood family who just so happened to have the same name as you and who almost certainly wouldn’t find out that you were pretending to be one of them.”  Pansy rubbed at her forehead again.  “All that rubbish with the charmingly-outdated etiquette –”

Hermione shrugged.  “It was easier to find older books of etiquette – probably because it suited Purebloods better to be able to spot Muggleborns, halfbloods and the _nouveau-riche_ by their old-fashioned manners – and if I were really from a Pureblood family that hadn’t taken part in society for decades, of _course_ I wouldn’t know modern manners.”

“I take back what I said about the Time-Turner,” Pansy said.  “ _This_ is clearly the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done.”

“In hindsight, I might have gone a little overboard.”

Pansy snorted.  “That’s one way of putting it.”

“Anyway, when I put the Hat on my head, it agreed with me that I couldn’t go into Gryffindor again, even though I did have the sort of recklessness that often goes well in that House; and it said I did have some Hufflepuff values but I wouldn’t get along well socially there; and just when I was expecting it to shout _Ravenclaw!_  it said it was impressed by my ambition and cunning and it’d be a shame to put one of the most Slytherin children it’d seen so far into another House, and it wouldn’t even have to worry about the social implications of putting a Muggleborn into Slytherin because I’d already dealt with that, and before I could think straight to argue with it I was a Slytherin.  And then all I could really do was work out how to deal with it.”

“I can’t argue with that, I suppose.”  Pansy glanced up at her.  “That’s all that’s going to save you in Slytherin, you know.  The fact that half the House thinks you’re the most Slytherin person in our year, Pureblood or no.”

“And the other half hates me.”  Hermione smiled, a little wry.

“Better than the rest of the school: half of them hate you for being such a good Slytherin, and the rest hate you for either not being a model Muggleborn or for not being a model Pureblood.”

She didn’t reply, and for a few minutes they stood in silence.  Hermione’s fingers twitched minutely against her thigh – counting supporters the same way she counted cards, maybe.  Pansy wandered over to the window, peering out at the students below them enjoying the sunshine.  They spread apart as Snape strode through the crowds, making a beeline for the Forbidden Forest, and she turned back, struck by a thought.

“Is this why Snape’s always been so strange around you?”

“I think so, yes.  He knew I was Muggleborn.  I think he’d expected to have to pull apart a fight, or warn the rest of you to leave me alone, and instead it turned out that you believed I was a Pureblood.  Dumbledore found me wandering around the castle the first Saturday of term and questioned me about the whole business.  I told him what had happened; I thought maybe he’d have some explanation, or at the very least would be able to stop the troll from getting in.”

“But he didn’t make you tell the truth.”

Hermione shook her head.  “He wanted to, I think – he disapproved quite a lot – but I pointed out that revealing I’d been lying would just make things worse, since nobody liked me enough yet to not care that I was really Muggleborn.  He said he doubted it’d stay secret in the long run, and I’d be better off not lying about who I was, but, well.  It was too late for that, really.”

“I cannot believe you did something this ridiculous,” Pansy said with a sigh.

“Can’t you?”  The corner of her mouth crooked up.  Sunlight glinted off the chain around her neck where it vanished beneath her robes.

Maybe she could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This came about thanks to a piece of fanart I saw on Tumblr, featuring Harry/Draco, Ron/Blaise and Hermione/Pansy. I am very into a) Gryffindor/Slytherin pairings, b) femslash, and c) dumbass pairings that really shouldn't work (ask me about my Petunia/Regulus idea... actually, don't), so I was immediately into the idea of coming up with a fic where they got together in school (since it honestly makes more sense, canonically, that they'd get together later). I figured an alternate Sorting would make it easier, so I was tossing around ideas - Slytherin Hermione is fun but seems like it'd be stressful to write, since she'd have to deal with significant amounts of bigotry; Gryffindor Pansy strikes me as unlikely, given what little we see of her personality in canon, unless it was some kind of time travel AU where she found her courage after graduating, ended up back in first year and got sorted... HOLY SHIT, TIME TRAVEL SLYTHERIN HERMIONE. So if I ever did come up with enough to continue this, it'd definitely be Hermione/Pansy. I don't know that I will, though, since the only ideas I have are pretty vague, along the lines of "well I guess the Order would be significantly more Slytherin this time around" and "would Draco get over his cognitive dissonance soon enough to end up not a Death Eater? who tf knows". But there would definitely be a lot of Slytherins forced to rethink their prejudices because they like Hermione too much to just dismiss her.


End file.
